Tag: Cloud

Continuing my discussion on major Cloud Platforms, in this post I will talk about VMware (subsidiary of EMC) – one of the companies that pioneered the era of virtualization. Flagship product of VMware is ESX (VSphere being product, which bundles ESX with vCenter) a hypervisor that runs directly on the hardware (bare metal). As you would expect, VMware is major player in private cloud and data center space. It also has a public IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud offering and also supports an open source PaaS platform (understandably no SaaS offerings). Below is a quick overview of VMware offerings.

Private Cloud – vCloud Suite is an end-to-end solution from VMware for creating and managing your own private cloud. The solution has two major components – Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud Management. Cloud Infrastructure components include VMware products like vSphere (cloud OS controlling the underlying infrastructure) and vCloud Director (multitenant self-service portal for provisioning VM instances based on vApp Templates), while Cloud Management consists of operational products like vCenter (centralized extensible platform for managing infrastructure) among others. There are also vCloud SDKs available which you can use to customize the platform to specific business requirements. Also, with last year acquisition of DynamicOps (now called vCloud Automation Center) VMware is extending its product support to other hypervisors in the market. Other vendors too like Microsoft are evolving with similar offerings with Hyper-V, System Center, SPF and Windows Azure Services. It’s important to note though, quite a few enterprises operate a private cloud like setup using VSphere alone and build custom periphery around it as necessary.

Public Cloud – In case you don’t have budget to setup your own datacenter or are looking to build a hybrid approach which helps you do a cloud burst for specific use cases, you can leverage VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service (AKA vCHS). The benefit here is migration and operation remains seamless, as you would use the same tools (and seamlessly extend your processes) that were being used for in-house Private Clouds.

PaaS Cloud – VMware has a PaaS offering for private clouds called vFabric. vFabric application platform contains various products focused on JAVA Spring Framework stack. Architects can create a deployment topology using drag and drop for their multi-tier applications. Not only they can automate the provisioning, but also scale their applications in accordance with business demand. In addition, VMware is also funding an open source PaaS platform called Cloud Foundry (CF). The value proposition here is you can move this platform to any IaaS vendor (vCloud, OpenStack, etc.), so when you switch between cloud vendors you don’t have to modify your applications. This is contrary to other PaaS offerings which are tied to the underlying infrastructure – e.g. application ready for Azure PaaS would have to undergo remediation to be hosted on Google PaaS. Also, being open source you can customize the CF platform to suite your needs (there is similar effort being carried out by Red Hat called OpenShift).

Finally, you might hear the term vBlock (or vBlock Systems) in context of VMware. VCE (Virtual Computing Environment) – the company which manufactures vBlock Systems was formed by collaboration of Cisco, EMC and VMWare. These vBlock systems racks contain Cisco’s servers & switches, EMC’s storage and VMware virtualization. There are quite a few service providers using vBlock, to create their own set of cloud offerings and services.